Member Dashboard

Happenings

Thursday, February 09, 2017

Parents Generally Like Their Child's Preschool

Parents, it turns out, tend to be pretty satisfied with their child's preschool—even when independent evaluators give those same preschools low marks
on measures such as the quality of classroom instruction and how much children are learning, according to a working paper by researchers at the Center on Educational Policy and Workforce Development at the University of Virginia.

The same dynamic applies to preschool characteristics that aren't necessarily measures of quality, but that can be very important to parents, such as a
center's affordability, its closeness to home, its hours of operation, or whether it serves meals. The researchers hypothesized that parents might
be happier with centers that offer more conveniences, but those characteristics also didn't appear to relate strongly to parents' overall satisfaction
with their child's preschool.

The findings were "striking" and appear to corrobate a long-held assumption in the early-childhood field that families have a hard time judging the quality
of the programs where they enroll their children, said Daphna Bassok, an associate professor of education and public policy and the lead author on
the working paper.

The working paper suggests that states and other public entities could play an important role in steering parents to higher-quality centers by putting
more information in front of them about how to pick good centers, and about the child-care choices that are available to them.

"When you give parents easy information about quality, experimental studies have shown that makes a big difference not only for where parents end up enrolling
their children" but for how those children perform in school later on, Bassok said.

Focus on Preschool Families in Louisiana

The research focused on 906 parents in Louisiana whose children were enrolled in publicly-funded preschools. Parents were asked to evaluate their child's
center in several different areas: opportunities to learn social skills, opportunities to learn academic skills, warmth of caregivers, affordability
and convenient hours, among others.

Parents were also asked to rate the features of the program that they liked the best. This question was important, Bassok said, because it allowed parents
to get past the psychological hurdle of criticizing the center where their children were enrolled.

And parents did rate some quality measures as better than others, so satisfaction was not uniform across the board. But the parents' greater satisfaction
in one area over another still did not appear to correlate to objective measures—such as a preschool's score on the Classroom Assessment Scoring
System, a tool that measures child-teacher interactions, or on child measures of literacy or math skills—or to convenience factors.

Bassok notes that there could still be a psychological component behind some of the parents' judgments. "No one wants to say, actually, I'm sending my
sweet 4-year-old child to a place that strikes me as terrible," she said.

And in 2016, a nationally-representative poll of more than 1,100 parents found that 88 percent rated their child's care as very good to excellent. This comes despite the fact that a 2010 evaluation said that 87 percent of publicly-funded preschool classrooms have levels of instructional
support that are too low to promote school readiness, said the University of Virginia working paper.

But the fact that parents will use information to enroll in higher-rated centers—when they have that information presented to them—suggests
this is a dynamic that can change, Bassok said. A lot of the parents in this study, for example, visited only one center before enrolling their children.

"There is a lot of room to help parents make more informed decisions," she said.